I Have Not Chosen A Book Since School

Every book you have ever read cover to cover was assigned to you by somebody else.

Sit with that for a second, because it is probably true and it is probably never been said out loud. Nine years of school reading. Two years of somebody's syllabus after that. A couple of things a manager handed over with a note about chapter four. And that is the list.

You have never once walked into a room full of books, on your own time, and picked one because you wanted it.

Which is why, when somebody says do you read, the answer that comes out is no, not really, and it feels honest and slightly untrue at once. You have read plenty. You have just never chosen.

Two things are not coming here, and you have run into both.

Nobody is handing you a list. No titles, no authors, no genre, and specifically not a set of things a man ought to have got through by now. That would be exactly the thing that has already happened to you nine years running, and doing it again is not going to help.

And nobody is saying a word about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows. Being told again by a stranger does not put a book in a man's hand.

What I want to look at is a muscle, and I think it is the one thing here that is genuinely underused.

You can read. Nobody ever let you choose.

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy

There is a sentence in Ecclesiastes 9 that is startling every time somebody actually reads it, because it is God clearing a man to enjoy an ordinary thing.

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. (Ecclesiastes 9:7, King James Version)

Look at the order, because the order is the whole argument.

The permission comes first. Go thy way. Eat. Enjoy it. And then the reason: for God now accepteth thy works.

You are handed your own bread and your own cup, and a shelf of other people's choices has never once been an appetite. The Spirit of God is present at that table, and it is written that God now accepteth thy works before the enjoying is ever asked for.

Not so that He will accept them. Not once it has been earned. The acceptance is already in place, and the enjoying is what happens on top of an acceptance that has already been granted.

And notice how ordinary the enjoying is. Bread. A cup. Nothing spiritual, nothing productive, nothing that had to be justified to anybody. A man is told to go about his business and enjoy his own dinner.

You are cleared to enjoy something plain, and thirty years of assigned reading has never once made a book you picked into an indulgence. Ecclesiastes 9:7 puts the permission ahead of the reason and then names the reason as an acceptance already given, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over a man who has never chosen.

There is something else in that verse worth holding.

Go thy way. Your way. Not the way, not a recommended way, not a curriculum. The instruction is aimed at a particular man going about his own particular business, and the enjoying is his own.

You have a way of your own to go, and nine years of somebody else's list has never once told you what you actually like. It is written that God now accepteth thy works and the sentence hands a man his own bread and his own cup, and the Spirit of God is present with somebody who has never once been asked.

Choosing is a muscle and nobody let you use it

Here is the mechanism, and it explains why picking a book feels weirdly hard for a competent adult.

Choosing what to read is a learned skill and it takes reps.

Readers who choose have built up a private map. They know they like a certain pace, that they lose interest when a book explains itself, that first person works for them and long descriptions do not. None of that arrived by insight. It came from picking forty books, being wrong about eleven of them, and noticing the pattern.

There is no map, because the reps never happened. Every book came pre-selected, so no information ever came back about your own taste, and thirty years later the map is blank and the blankness reads as not being a reader.

That is not a deficiency in you. It is a missing data set, and data sets get built one wrong pick at a time.

You are not a man without taste, and an empty map has never once been the same thing as an empty appetite. Ecclesiastes 9:7 hands a man his own bread and calls the enjoying of it accepted, and the Holy Spirit is present with somebody standing in front of a shelf with no idea where to start.

And there is a second thing, and it is the one that actually stops the hand.

If you choose, you can be wrong. An assigned book that turns out dull is the syllabus being dull. A book you picked that turns out dull is a verdict on you, and it comes with a small private humiliation attached, and thirty years of never choosing means never once having to feel that.

So the hand does not reach out. Not from indifference. From exposure.

You have room to be wrong about a book, and a bad pick has never once been a verdict on the man who made it. The written word tells a man to go his own way and eat his own bread with a merry heart and never once vets the menu, and His Spirit is the one who covers somebody taking a first swing at it.

Any book at all, because you picked it

So here is the assignment, and the reason clause is the whole of it.

Pick up any book at all today with nobody watching, and read one page of it because you picked it.

Any book. It does not have to be good, or worthy, or the sort of thing anybody would nod at. It can be a paperback off a table, something from a shelf in the house, anything at all with pages.

And nobody watching, which is deliberate. Not a bookstore where somebody might ask. Not a request for a suggestion. This is a pick made in private, so that being wrong costs nothing.

You are cleared before you reach, and thirty years of assigned reading have never once told you what you like. The Holy Spirit is the one at that table with you, and Ecclesiastes 9:7 puts the permission ahead of the reason and names the reason as an acceptance already given.

One page. That is all, and the reason has nothing to do with capacity.

Here is why one page.

The purpose tonight is not the reading. It is the rep. One choice made and acted on, which is the first entry in a data set that has been empty for thirty years, and the page is what turns a thought into an entry.

You are able to make a pick with nothing riding on it, and one page you chose has never once counted for less than four hundred somebody assigned. Ecclesiastes 9:7 says go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, for God now accepteth thy works, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a man choosing for the first time in his life.

You may find that the picking takes longer than the page. That is exactly right. The picking is the assignment and the page is the proof, and if it takes four minutes to choose and ninety seconds to read then the evening did its job.

You are being cleared to enjoy a plain thing without justifying it, and choosing has never once had to be done well to count as choosing. It is written that God now accepteth thy works, the permission comes before the reason in that sentence and not after it, and the Spirit of God is on a man reaching out for something nobody told him to take.